How it Began…

Welcome to Calm Together Therapies and Wellness centre, we wanted to take a moment to share with you our journey so far and our hopes and aspirations for the future.

We are a family owned small business that had humble beginnings working as a husband and wife team delivering psychological therapies and executive coaching to a wide range of audiences outside of our of our day jobs.

Following working as an Assistant Educational Psychologist supporting the delivery of child assessments and parenting interventions with local community CAMHS teams, then as a SEN case worker for a local authority Arlette became increasingly aware of the systemic factors and stressors surrounding the family system, she began working for a local relationship based charity and retrained as a family therapist, where she became increasingly passionate about working with traumatised families.

Arlette worked for a number of years with a human rights based organisation working with individual and family survivors of significant trauma, where she was able to develop an expertise and a deeper understanding of working with trauma.

Arlette was humbled not only by the emotional resilience of individual and families accessing this organisation but also by the sense of community and relational support that was offered within the community of clients.

During this period of time we unexpectedly became foster parents which added to our own frustrations around the lack of support/services for families struggling with a range of challenges and the lack of “relational” consideration. We are all part of something bigger than ourselves and when one person in our families struggles there is undeniably a “ripple effect”.

In October 2022 we decided to “grow” our small enterprise and open a therapy and wellbeing centre which puts a systemic, relational & trauma informed perspective to not only mental health and wellbeing but in relation to parenting and parenting challenges too.

January 2023 brings the ambitions of one family to support families within the community across the North East. With the support of local families and services (and our own family) we hope to continue to develop our service offers and enable access to help and support our clients with support with mental health, parenting challenges and general wellbeing.

Mel Kakkar joined us as Director of Clinical services in June 2023 which has increased our capacity and supported our continued growth. Mel brings a wealth of experience to our centre not only in relation to her clinical practice but also in respect to her management skills ( and humour – which we simply love). Mel will undoubtedly support our small community to grow and thrive. We are vey much looking forward to the future.